Cat & Exotic Pet Sitting in San Francisco
If you have a guinea pig and a cat, or a rabbit and a cat, or a reptile and a cat — you already know the bind. Most pet sitters take cats. Almost none of them know what they’re looking at when they walk into a room with a chinchilla cage in the corner. The exotic specialists who can handle the chinchilla often won’t take the cat. So you end up with two sitters, two sets of keys, two sets of instructions, and the constant low-grade worry that one of them is going to mishandle the other animal.
House of Guineas exists for exactly this household. We’re an exotic pet care team first — it’s right there in the name — and we look after cats too, whether your cat shares the home with a bearded dragon or is the only pet in it.
Why an Exotic-Trained Sitter Handles Cats Well
The skills required to care for exotics don’t disappear when you walk over to the cat. In fact, they translate surprisingly well:
- Vet-grade hygiene. We change gloves between species, keep rabbit hay out of the reptile room, and keep cat dander well away from a bird’s space. Cross-contamination matters with exotics, and it makes us better with cats too.
- Medication experience. A lot of cat sitters can’t reliably pill a cat — it’s a skill, and most general sitters don’t have it. Our team administers oral, topical, and subcutaneous medications to exotics every week. Pilling a cat is the easy part.
- Multi-species awareness. We know not to leave the rabbit’s exercise pen open while feeding the cat, not to let the cat into the bird room, not to disrupt the reptile’s UVB schedule because we’re spending extra time with the cat. Multi-pet households need a sitter who can hold all of it in their head at once.
- Comfort with one-of-a-kind setups. Households with both exotics and a cat often have unconventional layouts — gated rooms, free-roam rabbit areas, climate-controlled enclosures, custom cat trees built around bird cages. Our team is comfortable navigating it.
What’s Included in a Cat & Exotic Visit
Every visit covers your full household:
- For the cat: litter scoop, fresh food and water, brushing if your cat tolerates it, play and attention based on what your cat likes, and a watchful eye on their behavior
- For the exotics: species-specific care — hay, fresh chop, cage cleaning, exercise time, water changes, medication administration as needed
- For the household: photo and video updates from every visit, written notes covering all animals, light home-care touches (mail, plants, alternating lights) on request
If your cat is on medication, walk us through it at the meet-and-greet. If your cat is shy of new people, we plan extra patience time on early visits — most cats settle within a day or two once they realize we’re the bringer of food.
Who This Service Is For
We built this service with the multi-pet household in mind — the family with a rabbit and a cat, the apartment with a chinchilla and a cat, the home with a parrot and a cat. Cat-only households are welcome too. The same vet-grade hygiene, medication skills, and patient, observant care we bring to exotics carry straight over to your cat, and plenty of our pet parents book us for a cat alone.
Service Area
We offer this service in San Francisco only — the Inner Sunset, Outer Sunset, Parkside, Pacific Heights, the Marina, SOMA, Cole Valley, Noe Valley, the Castro, the Mission, Haight-Ashbury, the Richmond, Forest Hill, and surrounding neighborhoods.
If you’re on the Peninsula, our in-home exotic pet care is the one to book.
Pricing
Pricing follows our standard SF in-home rates:
- 30-minute visits start at $85
- 60-minute visits start at $115
- Twice-daily care runs $140–$190/day depending on visit length
In multi-pet households, the cat is included when care can be done within the same visit window, and cat-only visits book at the standard rates above. For larger households or longer visit needs, we’ll quote a custom rate. Text us your address and pet count for a firm quote.
Juggling a whole household of little ones? Multi-pet families often find a standing schedule is the easiest rhythm — weekly or every-other-week routine care visits where their caretaker deep-cleans the enclosure, logs weigh-ins, gives the exotics a gentle health check, and keeps the cat’s routine on track too, so home time is play time for everyone.
Ready to book? Call or text us at 415-484-6493 and we’ll set up a free meet-and-greet to walk through your full household — exotics, cat, and all. You can also read more about our in-home exotic pet care service, our boarding option, or our broader services and rates page.